Would anyone else find a drop shadow effect useful in Shotcut? I’ve wanted to ask this for a while (I’ve been using Shotcut for about a year now), but I’ve been afraid because my searches coming up short made me wonder if I was missing something.

So far, I’ve gotten by adding the effect to images before importing them. This is usually fine except for the fact that scaling/manipulating these prepared images obviously means altering their shadows, too, which isn’t always what I’d like to do. Also, videos are left out in the cold entirely unless I want to dedicate a video track to filtered shapes or prepared images under them to approximate the effect.

I see the drop shadow effect isn’t in the road map, and I can’t find anyone talking about it here, so maybe there’s really no interest at all in it. Any thoughts?

This is usually fine except for the fact that scaling/manipulating these prepared images obviously means altering their shadows,

Not sure if you use GIMP, but it’s a wonderful free open source graphic editor.
I created this using GIMP, and used it within Shotcut. Export to PNG format for transparency.
Took me just a few minutes to make the PNG.
Same can be done with Mask and Opacity filters, but it’s just faster making the PNG image yourself, in my opinion anyway.

Thank you, Hudson. No, I don’t use GIMP (I’ve never heard of it), but I do already use a graphic editor now to create shadowed PNGs to import into Shotcut.

I’m asking about having this effect made a feature within Shotcut for both ease and uniformity. For example, say I import two images with this effect into Shotcut with equal dimensions. I then scale one of those images larger. The scaled image will appear to have a larger shadow than the other image.

If Shotcut had its own drop shadow effect, its parameters could be maintained independently from the object. Additionally, I’d like to use this effect on video clips. I know I can place a shape with similar dimensions to a clip on a track under it, offset it, and tease it with filters to achieve something similar, but then I’d have an additional object to manipulate if I wanted to move the clip around at all.

I usually do drop shadows in a gfx editor too and use PNGs so they can be semi transparent, but a dedicated feature would be a nice addition. There’s been a few times when I’ve used Chroma-key overlays or MOVs with transparency, that a moving drop shadow would have been that finishing touch that really iced the cake

There is no “drop shadow” filter in Shotcut but drop shadow for text can be easily done by duplicating text filter and change color, opacity, blur, position etc. Here is the tutorial link https://youtu.be/8GOj43Q9KtM

I don’t find the dropshadow filter in https://www.mltframework.org/plugins/PluginsFilters/ so, it takes time to give priority on this. You guys are creative and familiar with HTML and webvfx so any one can contribute by making drop shadow video filter for Shotcut based on webvfx. Someone in this forum member made text filter based on webvfx which was nice.
Thank you.

One advantage of using overlaid text and mask filters to create drop shadows, as opposed to using transparent png images, is that if you choose to, you can change the shadow position.using key frames. Can’t do that with static png images.